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Bede composed
Historia Ecclesiastica GentisAnglorum
(The Ecclesiastical History of the English People), where the “Gens Anglorum” were deemed to be a specific and identifiable race sprung out of Saxon and Old English roots. In Bede’s history, “the English were God’s new ‘chosen’ nation elected to replace the sin-stained Briton in the promised land of Britain.” 1 (This belief in God’s providential choice, most ably expounded by Milton in the seventeenth century, survived until the latter part of the nineteenth century.) The notion of Englishness itself was a religious one from the moment Pope Gregory sent Augustine to England with the mission of establishing a Church of the English, in the light of his celebrated if apocryphal remark “
non
Angli sed angeli
” (“Not Angles but angels”). A late seventh-century biography then declared that Gregory would lead “
gentem
Anglorum
” into the sight of God at the time of the Last Judgement. One of the reasons for the success of the Reformation, and the formation of the Church of England, lies in this national zeal.
    King Alfred is associated with “the councillors of all the English race” in a late ninth-century treaty, and defined himself as “
rex
Anglorum et Saxonum
.” In the preface to the translation of Gregory’s
Cura Pastoralis
he alludes to “
Angelcynn
,” or Englishkind, and “
Englisc
.” The “D” and “E” texts of the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
evince the spirit of English nationalism with reference to “this nation,” “all the people of England” and “all the flower of the English nation.” 2
    The nationalism of the Anglo-Saxon period has been maintained by the fact that no other European nation has kept its boundaries intact over so many centuries. English literature, too, is among the oldest in Europe. It has been remarked that the heroic poetry of England after 900 strikes a singularly patriotic note, and we may regard that date as significant.
    Archbishop Wulfstan’s “Sermon of the Wolf to the English,” of 1014, continually invokes
theodscipe
or the nation in an act of sympathetic if admonitory communion. As one historian has put it, “Englishness was the creation of the Anglo-Saxons, and it was they who made England.” 3 It was of crucial importance, in this context, that many charters and wills were composed in Old English; the language itself becomes an image of unity and identity. In that most important of Old English poems,
Beowulf
, the voices possess “eloquence and understatement,” a “melancholy” and “firm resolve,” 4 which were bequeathed to subsequent English literature. In the art of the ninth and tenth centuries, too, there is an unmistakable Englishness in the employment of light and delicate outline. In the architecture of the same period irregularity and the pragmatic assembling of parts have also been deemed to be essentially English in spirit.
    Yet from the beginning there are ambiguities and paradoxes. In painting, for example, the Anglo-Saxon style was inspired and modified by continental models before it could achieve maturity; the insular idiom was most fully expressed and developed precisely in relation to Mediterranean art of the same period. It could not exist without its continental counterpart. The power of Anglo-Saxon culture springs in part from absorption and assimilation, thus emphasising a more general point concerning “the susceptibility of the English artist to alien influences . . . and his willingness to tolerate and even adapt to his own purpose any acceptable new elements.” 5 This has been the pattern of the centuries, and indeed it can be maintained that English art and English literature are formed out of inspired adaptation; like the language, and like the inhabitants of the nation itself, they represent the apotheosis of the mixed style.
    We may identify here a sense of belonging which has more to do with location and with territory, therefore, than with any